OUR OPINION: County cannot rewrite history

Peterborough This Week

When we first heard that the Peterborough Regional Health Centre was taking Peterborough County to court over its contribution to the building fund, like most of you, we were taken aback. After all, this is a community where differences between publicly-funded parties are usually worked out with meetings and compromise, not lawsuits.

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Who would expect that the County would not follow through on its commitment to the hospital that serves most of its residents? Surely the hospital misunderstood the commitment from 2001, many of us thought.

Then we dug a little deeper.

We found our stories from the 2001 County budget meetings and discovered the message was clear enough for our reporter at the time to capture the facts you now see in the legal documents presented by the hospital. The bylaw passed by the County also lays out clearly what both parties agreed to do.

If the hospital is $16-million short on the bank loan payments, that would plunge it back into the black financial hole from which it just returned. If you don't think that will affect patient care, then you're not being realistic.

Eleven years later, many of the players have changed so it's not surprising that people are looking back and trying to interpret what was decided at the time. The last election saw many county council positions changed up and key senior staff members have also moved on to other jobs. The same is true at the hospital, so many of the recollections of what happened more than a decade ago are not based on firsthand experience.

That said, even some of the people who were helping the hospital raise money don't remember the County committing to a $30-million payout that covers the interest generated by the $14-million donation once it was spread out over a number of years to lessen the immediate tax burden. But the records we've seen don't lie.

County residents likely won't be thrilled that they have to keep paying, but let's look at the consequences if the County reneges. If the hospital is $16-million short on the bank loan payments, that would plunge it back into the black financial hole from which it just returned. If you don't think that will affect patient care, then you're not being realistic.

Based on what we've seen, it's not the hospital that is losing face here. The County said it would do one thing and isn't following through, possibly due to staff changes or a new plan that they didn't share with hospital administrators at the time.

Rather than duke it out in court, we would rather see both publicly-funded organizations admit there was a miscommunication and find a peaceful settlement. The sooner this is resolved, the better.